Ozzy Osbourne shocked by success of Black Sabbath's new album

Years of false starts, setbacks led to release of 13, a No. 1 hit.

Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, left, wrote the lyrics for "Is God Dead?" which frontman Ozzy Osbourne describes as a provocation for anyone who’s ever called the band "satanic."

By:Rick McGinnisSpecial to the Star, Published on Fri Aug 09 2013

It’s been 35 years since Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals graced a new Black Sabbath album, and in the meantime the singer made himself a star, both as a solo artist and on TV, all the while fighting to win the title for Most Insane Man in Rock ’n’ Roll, with drug-and-booze-fuelled antics that would be the stuff of legend if they weren’t almost entirely true.

It’s a very different Ozzy who takes the phone after a new Black Sabbath record, 13, hit No. 1 in the U.S. and U.K. album charts. Answering questions in a telephone press conference, Osbourne sounds clear-headed and very sane, free with the expletives but also excruciatingly polite.

“We’re all like, ‘This is great, but why now?’” Osbourne wonders aloud. “When I used to do the Ozzfest, and bands would come up to me and go, ‘We’re not worthy’ … and I’m like, what are they talking about? Because we just played.

“Whatever feels good to you, you know. It’s as much a surprise to us as anybody else. I mean, we’re all like 45 years up the road and we get our first No. 1 in America, and it’s like wow, you know, maybe we are a bit too laid back.”

Ozzy’s exit from Black Sabbath in 1979 came while the band was trying to record the followup to Never Say Die! — an album Osbourne still recalls as their worst. They were mired in a boozy, druggy rut in Los Angeles, and guitarist Tony Iommi decided that their singer was the weakest link. He asked drummer Bill Ward, Ozzy’s closest friend in the band, to break the news to him.

“I wasn’t really happy with the way it ended because it was such a great dream come true for all of us,” Osbourne recalls. “Because we were like a band that wasn’t created by some business model. We were four guys and we just got together, made a record, and from then on our lives were forever changed.”

After a false start back at the turn of the millennium, Sabbath finally reunited with Osbourne two years ago to make another record. It might have turned into another dead end, as Iommi was diagnosed with lymphoma after recording began, and Bill Ward dropped out of the project for reasons still unknown. (Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk ended up in the drum chair.)

“I still love him a lot,” Osbourne says of Ward. “We all do. It’d be great to have him back, but we felt if we pulled the plug on this one, people would have gone, oh, it’s never going to happen. Because we tried, and we were speaking about it for a long time.”

As for Iommi, his illness and subsequent chemotherapy shifted recording from California to England, where Osbourne recalls marvelling at his bandmate’s persistence.

“Believe me, I know from first-hand with my wife that treatment for cancer is not like doing a line of coke and going to a disco. It knocks the crap out of you, you know?”

“We all moved to his studio in England, and we all stayed in a hotel for a while to accommodate him, and he would come down to the studio every day. I’d go, ‘Tony, you’re sure you’re OK to do this, man? Are you ready?’ And he goes, ‘No, I’ll do it,’ and he came down. He came up with the goods.”

“I thought, my God, man, he is Iron Man.”

The album is what you’d expect from Black Sabbath, with Iommi’s dread-laden riffs painting a nightmare landscape lamented by Osbourne with songs like “Damaged Soul,” “End of the Beginning” and the first single, “God Is Dead?” Ozzy describes that song, inspired by a Time magazine cover, as a provocation of sorts for anyone who’s ever called the band “satanic.”

“I thought, well, they flew a plane into buildings a few years back in the World Trade Center in the name of their God,” says Osbourne. “There’s pedophile priests everywhere, and where is God? I mean, there’s no good comes out of flying planes into buildings and blowing yourself up in the name of God, and I just thought, that’s so right, man. And I gave it to Geezer (Butler, Sabbath’s bassist) and Geezer gave me the lyrics.”

“It starts off pretty hopeless, but at the end, I don’t believe that God is dead. So in other words, there’s still hope, you know?”

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